


take a breath and softly say goodbye

by DefineSane



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Child Abuse, M/M, Masturbation, Non-Chronological, Past Abuse, Present Tense, cathartic angst, the abuse is not described in detail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-10
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 19:35:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/678129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DefineSane/pseuds/DefineSane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a long road into the ice for Steve and Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take a breath and softly say goodbye

Bucky is twelve and for the first time since he was aware enough to think, he realizes he doesn’t know it all and he can’t control the people and world around him and pain is a kind of knowledge that lodges in his ribs, sticks to the meat holding him together—

*

Bucky is eight the first time he sees the blond boy at the end of the hall in his apartment building, and he wonders when his family moved in. It’s only when he sees Mr. Rogers coming out of the apartment that he understands the family had been there all along and somehow he had managed to miss the presence of a boy his age.

He asks his mom about the boy, and she shushes him and goes out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette and talk to the ladies in the next apartment over, who occupy their own balconies. Bucky decides to ask her again later and investigate further on his own.

Of course, he doesn’t take into account Mr. Rogers coming home while he is spying, trying to stare right through the flimsy board of the apartment door and into the other boy’s head.

Mr. Rogers gives him a suspicious look, but Bucky is only eight—and scrawny for his age—so he can’t look like all that much of a threat. Bucky decides to play that to his advantage and gives Mr. Rogers a wide-eyed smile.

“Are you one of Steve’s friends?” he asks, and the gruffness of his tone is more intimidating than Bucky is willing to admit. Bucky puffs up his chest in response.

“Yes, sir, I am,” he replies with the dignity of a liar who thinks he won’t get caught.

The man waves Bucky forward. Steve’s apartment is the exact same layout as Bucky’s, tight hallway leading directly into a combination kitchen/dining room/living room that has a door to the balcony, and then three other doors that lead into the bedrooms and the bathroom. The walls are four shades darker than in Bucky’s apartment.

Mr. Rogers eyes Bucky. “Go on, then.” He jerks his head in the direction of the three doors and Bucky picks the door that in his apartment leads to his own room. Without hesitating, he barges in and throws the door shut behind him.

Steve is skinnier than Bucky remembers from the one glance he got of him. His arms are tiny, wrapped around a notebook that he holds to his chest like a shield. Steve sneezes violently and Bucky flops onto the foot of the bed.

“What’s kickin’, Stevie?”

*

Steve Rogers is eleven and his lungs feel sticky like someone poured soda-pop into them and left it to dry. His mom’s been convinced he has asthma for years, but this is the first time Steve is sure she’s right. His body struggles against his brain, and he tells himself to stop panicking because that only makes it worse, but somehow it seems like a good plan to get up and go for help and instead he falls off the edge of the mattress and onto the floor. By the time ten minutes pass, he’s able to get up and move through the living room and onto the balcony without falling again. He does have to rest for a moment at the dining room table, though. 

A couple months ago, Bucky jumped from balcony to balcony all along the apartment building to drag a length of twine from his apartment to Steve’s, tying off Steve’s end on the balcony railing and attaching a bell to his own.

Steve yanks on it, three staccato beats, three long, and another three short ones. He waits a minute, pressing his forehead to the railing, and repeats the pattern. 

A pressure builds in his chest until it feels like his ribs are pulling in against his lungs, his heart racing and skin sweaty, palms slipping on the railing, cheek scraping against the rusted metal as the ground rushes up towards him.

Steve’s body has never been good at following the orders from his brain—Bucky had always joked there was too much stupid gumming up the works—but for the first time Steve feels like his body is actively working against him.

*

Bucky is eleven when he finds Steve on the balcony crying hysterically as he fights for air. It is the most terrifying moment of his life. 

*

Steve is thirteen and he steals the bottle of hooch his mom keeps at the back of the top shelf in the kitchen—the one she has for sterilizing cuts and scrapes when they don’t have iodine on hand—and he drinks half a glass worth in one go. When he wakes up, his mom has not yet returned from her nightshift at the hospital and he spends an hour making sure everything is put back perfectly.

Paging through his sketchbook that afternoon, he finds page after page of messy outlines of a face, a body, a pair of hands that he does not remember drawing. Bucky Barnes is splashed across the pages.

*

Steve is twelve and his father has been dead three years, but he still remembers how helpless he had felt when the man would yell at his mom and push her around. It didn’t take long before Steve tried to get between them, not really sure what he was doing but knowing he had to do something.

One thing Steve never tells anyone about, not even Bucky, is how Mrs. Rogers spent the last few months Mr. Rogers was alive locking Steve into his room from the outside whenever she knew Mr. Rogers was about to start up on her.

Steve hoards those memories and classifies them un-shareable. He keeps them from Bucky, specifically. He doesn’t want Bucky to think less of him, he doesn’t want Bucky to see the humiliation of the memory, he doesn’t want Bucky to talk about his father because despite all of Mr. Rogers’ faults Steve still loved him in a painful self-delusion sort of way.

But really, Steve just wants to prove to himself that Bucky is not someone he can share everything with. Some things are just too shameful.

*

Steve is twelve and half-asleep one morning when he jerks off while thinking of Bucky. When he is finished, there is no relief, only a deep-set ache that lodges itself between his ribs and gets caught in the sticky substance in his lungs. He heaves a labored sigh.

In the quiet of morning, Steve remembers being nine and trapped in his bedroom while he listens to his father yelling until there’s a loud thump and he stops. Minutes later, even through the bedroom door, Steve can hear someone knock to enter the apartment, and the subsequent greeting his mother gives, soft and jumbled. Bucky unlocks the door to his room and comes in with a serious face.

“I must have locked myself in by accident,” Steve grates out from weary lungs. Bucky nods, and Steve doesn’t remember the memory until he is twelve and too far down the rabbit hole to see where exactly it was that he fell from.

*

Bucky is twelve and his father hits him for the first time.

*

Steve is thirteen. Bucky is fourteen, but has only been so for three days. Steve is a month younger than him, and it has always grated that even with the similar age Bucky towers over Steve. There has been talk of growth spurts that will never happen, but in the end Steve just wants to be an equal for once.

Even though it’s Steve’s room they meet up in, Bucky almost pushes him off the mattress when he lies down next to him, singsonging a cheery, “Respect your elders, mister,” when Steve starts to complain.

They sit with their own thoughts for a minute, Bucky so jittery that Steve feels his elbow twitch against his side every few seconds.

“Listen,” Bucky finally says, fiddling with the sleeve of his jacket. “I brought you something, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”

“You didn’t steal anything, did you?”

“No! God, Steve. I’m not a criminal.”

“Sorry. You’re acting weird.”

Bucky stares straight at Steve as he pulls a ragged, folded-up piece of paper out of the inside of his jacket. There’s a naked lady on it, one of the fold lines falling neatly across one nipple.

Steve shoves the paper away, and it falls from Bucky’s hand to the floor. “That’s not funny, Bucky—“

*

Bucky is seventeen and drunk and undeniably flirting with the bartender. Steve started out the evening wondering if he was going crazy, but by the offended look on the bartender’s face, Steve is pretty sure he’s not the only one thinking that Bucky is being obvious.

The night is cold, cold enough that Steve regrets leaving their shared apartment without his jacket. He hunches a bit closer to Bucky, ostensibly holding the drunk man up.

“D’you hate me, Steve?” Bucky slurs.

“No. I don’t hate you.” Their apartment is still blocks away and, with the night not getting any younger, Steve pulls hard on Bucky’s torso to get him to go forward.

“I hate me sometimes.”

Steve does not feel like indulging Bucky in whatever silly mood he’s gotten himself into, so he ignores him until they get back to the apartment.

The bare light bulb they’d had hanging from the ceiling burned out last week, so the only light in the apartment is from the streetlamps through the window. Everything looks yellow.

Steve shoves Bucky onto the mattress in the bedroom and goes out into the dining room. They only have the one mattress, and usually Steve is alright sharing with Bucky, backs turned to each other, but tonight he doesn’t feel up to it. Instead, he sits at the table in the dark and ponders ad nauseum every gesture and every word Bucky exchanged with the bartender.

The door hits the wall as Bucky stumbles out of the bedroom. Steve is surprised Bucky can even get up with the amount of alcohol he had put away, and he can’t say he’s happy about being wrong.

“I’m sorry, Steve.”

“You shouldn’t have talked to the bartender like that.” Steve mutters, tracing the wood grain on the table with his index finger.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t understand you sometimes,” Steve says.

“Last year,” Bucky starts with a minor slur to the words. “When we moved in. I didn’t mean—“

“It’s okay, Bucky. You don’t have to explain.”

“I made a mistake.”

*

Steve is sixteen and he’s never even kissed a girl but somehow he’s kissing Bucky and it’s not nearly as weird as he thought it would be.

Bucky is warm and they’re both a little drunk, not for the first time, but it all feels excusable. Steve climbs into Bucky’s lap, and somehow everything hurts a lot less there. Is this what home feels like, he wonders, right here on top of Bucky, no family or house needed, just Bucky’s lap in the quiet center of their newly rented apartment.

His mother has been dead two months, and it’s only because Steve is friendly with the landlord of the place that they can afford the apartment on the earnings of a handyman and an ad artist, but it is theirs.

Sitting in Bucky’s lap makes the apartment feel oddly redundant.

Steve drops a hand from Bucky’s neck to slide down his body, down, down, and close to Steve’s ear Bucky makes a pained noise.

“Steve, stop,” he whispers.

*

Bucky is seventeen and he says: “Your mother had just died. I assumed you weren’t thinking right, and you certainly weren’t acting like yourself. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

*

Steve is sixteen and he has never hated himself more in his life. Not when he clawed at a locked door, not when he couldn’t breathe, not when he first realized the mess he was getting into—he has made a mess of his life and he does not know how to fix it or even if it can be fixed, so instead he wakes up the next day and pretends he does not remember the shameful press of Bucky’s hands on his shoulders pushing him away and telling him to go to sleep, to just go and sleep it off and, God, Steve stop this right now, go to bed.

*

Bucky is seventeen and way too drunk to be having this conversation. Steve knows that, he knows that he is taking grave advantage of the situation, but it feels good to know the truth after all the hours-days- _years_ spent dwelling on every second of what was inevitably a short-lived affair.

“It was real for me,” Steve tells him, dragging his chair out from the table. Before he has the chance to stand up, though, Bucky stumbles over and drops to his knees in front of him. He puts his head in Steve’s lap, sighs, closes his eyes.

“I made a mistake, Steve,” Bucky repeats, the slur on the name dropping the ‘t’ and dragging out the ‘eeeee.’

“It’s okay. We’re okay.” Steve pets his hair and wonders what the morning will bring.

*

Steve is eighteen.

“I’ve decided to join the military.” Steve gives a tentative smile with hope plain on his face.

“But… But they 4F-ed you.” Bucky had been tallying his budget for the week, pencil lead smudging all over paper and fingers as he struggled with the math of stretching a dollar. He looks up.

“Well, I’m going to try again.” The pencil hits the floor with Steve’s smile.

“Oh, Hell, Steve. Why would you do that? You’re safe here, there’ll be jobs to go around in no time—why not just ride out the storm?”

“I want to help.” Steve lifts his chin, and Bucky knows that’s the end of that so far as Steve’s concerned.

*

Bucky is fifteen and he spits out, “You’re a bastard sometimes, you know that, right?”

*

Bucky is eighteen and even though he knows it’s stupid, he joins the military out of spite. Maybe Steve will realize, Bucky thinks as he cuts through a parking lot. Maybe Steve will get that Bucky is sacrificing so Steve doesn’t have to.

His enlistment forms are tucked into his shirt, molded against the warmth at his center of gravity. They crinkle as he takes a step forward.

*

Steve is eighteen and he sleeps alone, curled up in a corner of the apartment he shares with the man that is asleep in the next room over. He leans against the trashed wallpaper and the walls push back.

*

Bucky is eighteen and he goes to war.

Steve is nineteen and he follows the breadcrumbs of his best friend’s life to a new continent, a new body, a new self.

Bucky and Steve are twenty and they go into the ice.

**Author's Note:**

> Shamelessly unbeta'd.
> 
> There is a slight chance of a sequel. This ship won't leave me alone lately.
> 
> (Also, I swear I stole the so-and-so-is-however-old thing from someone, and if you can let me know who that was, I'd be happy to credit. I know I didn't come up with it on my own, I'm not that clever.)


End file.
